Affordable Housing

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, thank heavens there are not even more Liberal Democrats wanting to speak on this subject, but we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for introducing it and I agree with much of his remarks.

We are at a hopeful moment in tackling the serious problem of providing affordable housing. As the noble Lord said, the Prime Minister takes a keen personal interest in housing, and I know that to be true. We have a Secretary of State who is new to the job and whom I know—I was a neighbour of his when I was the MP for Orpington—understands the problems of outer London. We have a Minister for Housing who was leader of Fulham Council and therefore understands very well the problems of inner London. We have my noble friend Lord Bourne, who is also aware of the problems from his local government experience. We have a good team.

In comparison with the dire days, if I may call them that, of the Housing and Planning Act—I see the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, nodding his head fiercely—we are heading in the right direction on policy. The first augury of that was the Prime Minister’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference that the Government will be lifting the cap on local authority spending on housing. Some of us campaigned for that for years and years and are absolutely delighted that it is happening.

However, there is a big roadblock, a huge boulder in the way of achieving proper policy on affordable housing: the price of land. In the south-east of England, agricultural land is priced at £22,000 per hectare. After planning permission is granted, it becomes £3.6 million per hectare. In London, that figure of £22,000 becomes £29.1 million per hectare. Land is 275 times more valuable with planning permission than without. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out, 75% of all the gains of that, which are reckoned to be £13 billion a year, go to the developers, the speculators and the landowners, when it should be the other way round.

As Shelter pointed out in its admirable document, New Civic Housebuilding, the problem is that the more that goes to the landowner or developer, the less goes into keeping the price down, having good design and quality and good local services to connect to the housing. The answer, as Shelter pointed out in its document, is to reform the compulsory purchase orders and revise the 1961 Act. That was in all our manifestos; we are all committed to that. I remind the House that no less than 150 years ago, Joe Chamberlain, the then Mayor of Birmingham, said of the CPO orders he was putting through:

“We have not the slightest intention of making profit ...We shall get our profit indirectly in the comfort of the town and in the health of the inhabitants”.


I say amen to that.